. We fell to talking upon the subject, and when I left he gave me
a reprinted copy of the work which brought the revolution about.
    It had taken place some five hundred years before my arrival; people had
long become thoroughly used to the change, although at the time that it was made
the country was plunged into the deepest misery, and a reaction which followed
had very nearly proved successful. Civil war raged for many years, and is said
to have reduced the number of the inhabitants by one half. The parties were
styled the machinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end, as I have said
already, the latter got the victory, treating their opponents with such
unparalleled severity that they extirpated every trace of opposition.
    The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to remain in the
kingdom, neither do I believe that they would have done so had not the
Professors of Inconsistency and Evasion made a stand against the carrying of the
new principles to their legitimate conclusions. These Professors, moreover,
insisted that during the struggle the anti-machinists should use every known
improvement in the art of war, and several new weapons, offensive and defensive,
were invented while it was in progress. I was surprised at there remaining so
many mechanical specimens as are seen in the museums, and at students having
rediscovered their past uses so completely; for at the time of the revolution
the victors wrecked all the more complicated machines, and burned all treatises
on mechanics, and all engineers' workshops - thus, so they thought, cutting the
mischief out root and branch, at an incalculable cost of blood and treasure.
    Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of this description can
never be perfectly achieved; and when, some two hundred years before my arrival,
all passion upon the subject had cooled down, and no one save a lunatic would
have dreamed of reintroducing forbidden inventions, the subject came to be
regarded as a curious antiquarian study, like that of some long-forgotten
religious practices among ourselves. Then came the careful search for whatever
fragments could be found, and for any machines that might have been hidden away,
and also numberless treatises were written showing what the functions of each
rediscovered machine had been; all being done with no idea of using such
machinery again, but with the feelings of an English antiquarian concerning
Druidical monuments or flint arrow-heads.
    On my return to the metropolis, during the remaining weeks, or rather days,
of my sojourn in Erewhon I made a resumé in English of the work which brought
about the already mentioned revolution. My ignorance
